racist

Liquid Generation has put together the 10 Most Racist Moments in TV. While the moments were extremely racist, I was expecting some more clips from primetime television, cartoons, and soaps. Most of the moments were just evidence of how some people are idiots (idiotic to think the way they do and idiotic to think that they should say something like that on television). I had other choice words in place of "idiot," but it will have to suffice -- trying to keep it clean.

My favorite moment from the video is from Jeopardy. Alex Trebek tells the Indian-American contestant, "Yeah, it hurts to miss that one" after he missed New Dehli as an answer. Got to love the Trebek.

Check out the video below and let me know what you think. Also, they play M.I.A.'s "Paper Planes" throughout the video which is a little distracting. I'd rather just hear audio from the clips.

Oprah is changing up her scheduled programming today in order to interview members of the Rutgers women's basketball team. The women were the subject of a racial and sexist slur by radio host Don Imus recently. On his show, Imus inexplicably called them "nappy-headed hos" after they lost the NCAA women's championship game. As a result, he was suspended by CBS Radio and has been fired by MSNBC.

Today, coach Vivian Stringer and ten players will appear on Oprah via satellite. It's only the second time they have spoken out in response to Imus' April 4th comments. Yesterday, the coach and several players said they found Imus' comments to be hurtful and insensitive.

I love reporting on the occasional political stuff: it's like tossing raw meat to a pack of wild dogs and watching them tear at each other. Now read this post and fight! Fight and bite, my polemic pooches!

Sorry, I shouldn't refer to my readers as "polemic pooches," that's not very nice. Anyway, here's the news:

Jason Wahler will spend the next two months in jail. No, you can't lock him up for simply being an idiot. He actually had to do something, like punch a city employee and a tow truck driver. Last year, the 20-year old co-star of The Hills and Laguna Beach: The Real Orange County blew his top when a tow truck was blocking the road as the driver tried to move an illegally parked car. Wahler reportedly got out of his vehicle and yelled racial slurs at the city worker and tow truck driver (both of them black) and then actually punched them both before being subdued. Blood-alcohol tests show Wahler's level was .22.

On top of his two months in jail, pretty boy will also have to attend a one-day program at the Museum of Intolerance. The judge was probably pretty strict with the guy because he was recently arrested in North Carolina for underage drinking and resisting arrest.

TMZ reports that back in 2005, a drunken Rachael Ray made some ugly remarks about Oprah, the woman who helped launch Ray into the spotlight. Then again, Ray may have done no such thing. That's pretty much the gist of the article. Careful readers will note that none of the sources are named, so I guess that's why it's called celebrity gossip. If Ray did indeed get drunk at an event in Century City and made racist remarks about the portrait of Oprah from Beloved that hangs in Harpo Studios, or referred to Angelina Jolie as a "backdoor c**t," it was muttered before people started filming embarrassing celeb moments with their camera phones. Now all we have is speculation about what someone may or may not have said two years ago.

If it makes Ray feel any better, I once called my little brother a "stupid doody idiot head" when I was five. I've always regretted saying it, and I hope no one was taping me, because I'd really hate for something I said when I was drunk to haunt me years down the road.

A couple of more TV celeb-related incidents post-Michael Richards rant have been making the news. First up, Andy Dick. You know him from News Radio, Less than Perfect and his MTV series The Assistant. He jumped on the stage at the Improv during Ian Bragg's set and, in an attempt at "too soon" humor, brandished the n-bomb. He's been apologizing ever since.

A legitimately funny and meaningful use of the "n-word," however, came from Damon Wayans' of Showtime's The Underground. Wayans took the stage at the now famous Laugh Factory last night with a stack of twenties. Since Richards' rant, the club owner has banned the word - levying a $20 per usage fee and three month ban on any comedian who uses the word. Wayans proceeded to drop the n-word sixteen times saying, "I'll be damned if the white man uses that word last." That's $320 price tag for a little freedom of speech, if you're counting.

If you've been following the Michael Richards apology tour, you know that the actor made an appearance on the Reverend Jesse Jackson's Keep Hope Alive radio program in which he claimed to be "shattered" by his own remarks. That wasn't good enough for the Rev. The day after Richards' appearance, Jackson called for a boycott of the recent seventh season Seinfeld DVD release to punish the actor where it really hurts - the pocketbook.

How boycotting the Seinfeld DVD set would actually hurt Richards is beyond me. Between syndication points and a series-run as Kramer, I think Richards is pretty set financially. As a symbolic act or even one motivated by publicity, I suppose a boycott makes a bit more sense -- but not much seeing as Richards' words were spewed without the consent of the entire cast and crew of Seinfeld. (I've linked to it in the past, but if you want a better reason to hold Seinfeld suspect, check out hip-hop artist Danny Hoch's monologue about his scheduled appearance on the show.)

Setting aside Richards' racial slurs aside for a moment, watching the video of his onstage meltdown made me think of the kind of heated exchanges people get into where one becomes so enraged they reach deep into their reserves for the ultimate atomic bomb of an insult, the one word or phrase they can say that will completely flatten the person who is attacking them, and in Richard's case his racist comments . During his appearance on Letterman's show, Richards acknowledged that he lost his temper, and it seems fairly obvious to me that whatever self-censoring mechanism he had was overrode by his need to take down the people who were heckling him.

Comedians Tracy Morgan and Jeffrey Ross' MTV2 cartoon Where My Dogs At? has come under fire from some prominent blacks for the depiction of two black women on leashes, one of which defecates on the floor. The episode, which originally aired on July 1, was meant to spoof an actually occurrence when Snoop Dogg showed up at an event with two women wearing collars and chains. Viacom chairman Christina Norman, a black woman, defended the scene as a parody of a specific event, but New York Daily News columnist Stanley Crouch, who is also black, denounced the episode as perpetuating a negative stereotype about black people that has been prevalent on MTV for many years. I haven't watched this show at all, but if anyone saw the episode I'd be interested to read your opinion.

In 1951 Hanna Barbera created a Tom and Jerry short called "His Mouse Friday" that was later banned from television for its racist content. In the cartoon, which you can watch here, Tom is stranded on an island and Jerry paints himself up with black soot to resemble a cannibal and scare Tom. You'll notice that Jerry's dialogue and the dialogue of the island natives is muted. I'm not sure why that is, but based on what I found while scrounging for information on this cartoon, the dialogue was removed because of offensive slang. That information doesn't come from any official source, so take that for whatever it's worth. Questionable content aside, I don't think this is the best Tom and Jerry I've ever seen, though the scene where Tom is cooking in the stew pot and throws away the onion is pretty funny. And if nothing else, it's a nice little piece of animation history for fans of the medium.

Mr. Noblet (after showing his class a tape of Martin Luther King, Jr's "I Have A Dream" speech): King's dream was of an America without racism of any kind. The tragedy of course is that all this footage is in black and white. Imagine how powerful it would have been in color.

In this episode, a student spray paints the N-word in the hallway, and all of Flatpoint High is turned upside down as they try to figure out who did it. The easiest humorous route to take would have been to mock those blatantly racist enough to do such a thing, but this episode, like the "Ginger Kids" episode of South Park, cuts much deeper, exposing the varying degrees of prejudice that exist in all of us. Or, as one student says, "The only thing we hate more than a racist is spics."

The State University of New York at
Purchase is in an uproar after a closed-circuit television station on campus aired a thirty minute show in which a
white student decked out in blackface and another white student made jokes about blacks, gays, Jews, women... well, they
pretty much ran the gamut. Billy Prinsell, the student who appeared in blackface, insists he was making fun of another
host who had made fun of him, and that it was no different than what's seen on SNL or Chappelle's
Show. While I haven't seen the offending show and couldn't speculate on whether Prisnell is racist or just grossly
misguided, I don't think this story is uncommon to younger people who try to venture into satire for the first time. His
comparison to Chappelle's Show is spot on, but not for the reason he thinks. When Chappelle gets
impolitic, it's to expose a deeper truth. Mockery of other people is not automatically made defensible by slapping a
"satire" label on it. It may seem like an easy way to be cutting edge, but this particular form of comedy
takes a more skilled hand than people realize. When it's done haphazardly and without forethought, people get angry,
and rightfully so.

Despite all the
publicity leading up to Friday's premiere of The Book of Daniel on NBC, it still didn't do so hot in the
ratings. The two-hour premiere, which aired from 9-11 pm on Friday, averaged about 9 million viewers. That's fewer than
Close to Home, Numb3rs, In Justice, and 20/20, which all aired against
Daniel on CBS and ABC. In Justice and 20/20 barely beat Daniel, each with a little more than
9 million viewers.

I watched The Book of Daniel out of pure curiosity. I like Aidan Quinn and I
wanted to give the guy a chance. Plus, I wanted to see whether all the ruckus was justified. It wasn't.